The Geometry of Shadows
by Kia Vail-Kagami
Summary: Drabbels, unrelated to each other and about more or less every character. Product of boredom.
1. Dust to Dust

Dust to Dust

-

The sun is shining in a bright sky when they bury her, because the weather has no sense for tact and knows nothing of grieve and regret. It has been watching form above for five billion years and will do so for another time that long. It knows nothing of mortality, and passing.

The three gods that have come to the funeral know nothing of mortality either, but they have watched form much closer when the time passed and she grew old and faded, not the first and not the last but in the end the only one that ever really mattered.

When they are gone a golden harried woman steps out of the shadows and leaves a chain of flowers on the grave. They weren't close, but she has tasted mortality for a short time and feels the need to remember, if only for a moment.


	2. Midnight

Midnight

-

Heimdall has not expected to meet them here so he is not prepared to do anything and would have to let this meeting pass without a chance to finally get his revenge on Loki. He might have been able to come up with something – and if it only was a baseball cub from behind – but he has spend all day taking extra lessons for school and he is tired and even years of hatred are not enough to give him the energy required for murder.

After all he should not be surprised. As he is talking lessons Thor is taking part-time jobs that somehow make him turn up everywhere at the worst possible moments. Seeing him as a waiter in an all-night-cafe isn't any more surprising than seeing Loki and his youngest son sitting on one of the tables, gazing out of the window. Heimdall considers leaving the moment he enters but sits down instead and waits.

"Hi, Heimdall", Thor says in the cheerful way that meant 'I don't like you but I have to be nice because you are a customer.' "What is it today?"

"Coffee", he answers.

"Black, thick and bitter?" Thor suggests, still smiling. Heimdall glances over to Loki, who talks to the farce of a young man in front of him and seems not to notice him at all.

"Actually, I would like it sweet, with lots of milk and sugar."

"As you wish."

His coffee arrives a few minutes later, hot and sweet enough to make his teeth hurt.

Outside, the moon is rising and the night passes in silence.


	3. On the Abyss

On the Abyss

-

There are nights when Loki finds himself staring out of the window and at the moon for a long time, searching for the wolf that is chasing it across the sky. He does not find him, of course, because this is the human world and Hati is no more that a myth here, just as in Asgard this world is no more than a board for games. Usually, Loki looks at the mortals around him and sees nothing but moving game-pieces. He does not belong among them, he knows, and wishes he was elsewhere.

There are days, more and more lately, when Loki looks at the mortals around him and sees them as the persons they are, feeling and breathing and full of life, even if only for a short time. Sometimes, he thinks he might begin to understand them, just the slightest bit. He has come to fear and hate those days, because when he looks at the world through human eyes the sky is always higher than before and the sun is just a distant ball of fire.


	4. Dark Places

Dark Places

-

Yamino doesn't much miss the time before Midgard, before being human, and with every passing day it is easier to forget the cold water and the distance of the light high above. If his wishes mattered in any way he would like to stay here forever, playing the housekeeper for his father and help Mayura with her solving of wired mysteries. But it's only Loki's wishes that matter to him and he knows that Loki wants to return to Asgard, and so Yamino knows he will do, just as he himself will return to the dark waters, because he also knows that to Loki his wishes do not matter either.

In the end it doesn't matter much where he is, he tries to tell himself while sitting by the window, waiting for his father to return from one adventure or another, because the moon he sees here is the same moon he always saw and the nights are just as dark.


	5. No Surrender

No Surrender

-

"No surrender", Thor says and grins at Loki as they face the army of giants about to attack them. Too many, Loki would think, but he looks in his friend's eyes and knows that for Thor, just like for himself, surrender would never be an option.

In the end, as always, they win.

-

Narugami does not talk much about the times before Midgard as he passes through the days of his almost-human existence, but Loki knows he never forgets his wish of going back – that he, just like Loki, would never surrender to the routine of this life, as tempting as, sometimes, it might be. Surrender is not an option.

In the end, as always, they win.

-

They meet under a sky of smoke, in a world in flames. Loki's eyes are on Heimdall for he knows who his enemy will be in this battle and just like everyone else he knows how it will end. Yet, for no longer than a second, his gaze travels to Thor who does not pay intention to him but instead fixes his gaze on the giant serpent in Loki's back, that for this battle has returned to it's true form for the very last time.

It is hard to tell from this distance, but for the briefest of moments Loki almost thinks he saw him smile.


	6. Secrets

Secrets

-

Misao Daidôji has been able to see ghosts for as long as he can remember. When he was a child they scared him and he chose to ignore his gift, told himself they weren't there. He became so good at ignoring that, as time passed, he forgot that he could see them at all.

However, there was one ghost that would not be ignored, _could_ not be ignored – that was always there, at the edge of his awareness, even when it wasn't present.

He watches now, as Mayura waves goodbye and leaves the house to visit her wired friends. She passes straight through the barely visible form of her mother as she runs out of the door, blissfully ignorant of everything she cannot see. The woman smiles sadly at nothing before she leaves as well and for once, Misao is grateful that there are some little secrets he and his daughter do not share.


	7. Deathwalker

Deathwalker

-

They say that hope is the last to die. For Hel that isn't true. She held on to hope for as long as she could and then let it slip away and fade to nothing. She did not miss it though the vague jealousy she felt toward her youngest brother did little to fill the empty space hope had left inside her heart when it died.

When Hel came to this world she knew that she would not be able to stay for long, one way or another. She came anyway.


	8. Real Time

Real Time

-

Time moves different for a mortal. Reiya has no way of knowing that, because she knows nothing of her true nature, doesn't remember the times she spent in her true form as the goddess of fertility. Freya, on the other hand, remembers everymoment of her other life, remembers the minutes that go by much more clearly than she ever noticed the passing of time before. As a goddess she never paid much attention to time for nothing ever changed. Now every minute that passes is one minute less to life for Reiya, and though she is still a little girl Freya is already counting the seconds, trying to calculate how much time is left until she will have to say goodbye to that existence because it has run out of years. For an immortal time has no meaning and so it passes before they even notice, turning future into past and life into nothingness in the blink of an eye.

Age and dying are the last things on Reiya's mind, for she doesn't notice the passing of time in the same way, or at all. She is only a child, after all, and the future is still very far away.


	9. Falling Stars

Falling Stars

-

They had to write an essay for school over the weekend, and though the topic was free Mayura was more than annoyed by it – after all she would have preferred to chase after mysteries, rather than only writing about them. Narugami, on the other hand, didn't seem to mind. He chose Nordic Mythology' as a topic and got pretty good marks for it, even though he wrote much more than the required five pages. Mayura cloud hardly believe he would know so much about something as boring as that.

He looked a little nervous when she asked him about it after school.

"I had an interest in things like that when I was a child", he finally said. "Some of it kinda stuck to my memory."

"But it's so _boring_!" Mayura exclaimed. For a moment, she thought, he almost seemed personally insulted by her words, but then he grinned his usual carefree grin.

"Actually, I think you would like it if you knew more about it. Mythology has a lot of 'wired mysteries' in it."

"Yeah, but that kind doesn't interest me", Mayura said matter-of-factly. "It isn't real, after all."

Narugami didn't look at her. "Ah, yes," he only mumbled, as if he'd forgotten.


	10. In the Night

In the Night

-

"There's a festival at the temple this evening. The whole class is going. Come with us, Kazumi."

He was busy plotting Loki's demise. "No", he said. "I have work to do."

Evening came.

"Hey, Kid! Did you get lost? You shouldn't be out alone in the dark. Come, I'll escort you home."

The woman was disrespectful, and mortal. He didn't grace her with an answer.

Night fell.

The streets were still busy. He met Thor at a corner, selling Tokoyaki. "You look hungry", he said and offered him some for free, either forgetting that they were on opposite sides or not caring. Thor was always like that. But he'd helped Loki and was labelled 'enemy' in his eyes, so he turned the offer down and left.

Midnight came, and passed.

He came home at half past two in the morning. "Where have you been?" Freyr sounded all too much like a scolding parent. "I've been worried." He hadn't been sleeping, that much the other god could tell, who didn't care and didn't answer. Freyr was angry. He left, finally.

Heimdall kept staring out of the window for the rest of the night and didn't notice the sun when it rose.


	11. Hiding Place

Hiding Place

-

Sometimes Skuld would walk into the ocean and not come out for hours. She would keep her breath and watch the clouds move across the sky from below the surface. She likes the silence there and if she was true to herself she would say that she liked to be in a place where _he_ couldn't reach _her_ for a change, if he wanted to. Which he doesn't.

Her thoughts never wander that far.


	12. No Compromises

No Compromises

-

Mayura didn't much like living in the real world. It was boring, dull. School didn't teach her anything she wanted to know or thought she'd need ever again.

The world Mayura wanted to live in was full of mysteries, ghosts and monsters. Deep down inside she knew that she was dreaming a dream, but she refused to open her eyes and face reality.

If at times a mystery crossed her way at a time she was supposed to learn for school or even write a test, it was never hard for her to make a decision.


	13. Spider

Spider

-

First Thor came to Midgard and it took Loki a while to realise that he had been send to kill him. Then Heimdall and Freyr showed up and Reiya wasn't quite as harmless as she appeared to be. The Norns came to cause trouble, followed by Hel, and Loki finally got angry.

At first he didn't take it very serious. Assassination attempts, wired games – but it isn't funny anymore. And behind it all Odin sits like a spider in the web, and Loki doesn't understand.


	14. Return

Return

-

They all knew a certain point had been crossed when they had the chance to go back home and didn't take it, because 'home' wasn't that easily defined anymore and going back didn't have the same appeal as before, when there was nothing here to stay for. They knew it wasn't only Mayura, and the other mortals they had come to know and care about that kept them on Midgard, but still they liked to pretend. That once those people were gone – for good or just elsewhere – they would go home and never look back, but deep inside, all of them felt that it wasn't that easy. Other people would come into their lifes if they stayed, to keep them here, to make leaving too hard to bear. They had decided not to go, all of them, and now they couldn't shake off the uneasy feeling that this decision had been final.

It will come back to haunt them later, but for now they will just try and pretend they are happy and that the choice had been the right one.


End file.
